FRASER turned 15 in 2019, and we celebrated by adding thousands of new items to our digital library of economic and financial history.
Federal Reserve Materials
In 2019, as we do every year, we expanded many of FRASER’s collections of Federal Reserve System materials. You’ll find new issues of Fed research publications and statements and speeches by Fed leaders, including members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (BOG). The most recently released Federal Open Market Committee meeting materials are now available on FRASER. We also expanded our collection of the BOG’s statistical releases, adding the H.4.3 Condition of Weekly Reporting Member Banks in New York and Chicago release. FRASER continues to hold the largest collection of these materials.
In partnership with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, we added issues of that Bank’s flagship research publication, Review, from 1981-2004. The Economic Brief of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, a series of web-exclusive essays on current economic issues, was added as well, with coverage from 2008-2019. Also new to FRASER is A History of The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, a previously unpublished manuscript by historian Franklin M. Garrett. It covers the founding, development, and progress of that Bank and its branches from its organization in 1914 to 1968.
Archives and Historical Publications
In partnership with the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, the papers of G. William Miller, Chairman of the BOG from 1978 to 1979, were digitized and added to FRASER in 2019. This collection of reports, memorandums, and correspondence documents Miller’s work as Chairman and later Secretary of the Treasury and provides insight into an interesting moment in the nation’s economic history. Read more about Miller’s career and changes to monetary policy in the 1970s in this Inside FRASER post, and learn more about the issues of the day in Miller’s own words with our expanded collection of his statements and speeches.
On the historical data side of things, in 2019, our collection of Rand McNally Bankers Directories expanded to include volumes for 1920 and 1921. The FRASER team also worked with librarians at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to acquire and digitize many more volumes of the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, with additional issues of the annual retrospective, the Financial Review, now available for 1882-1920.
We also expanded our collection of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, including two new series of bulletins: the National Compensation Survey, 1996-2010, and the Occupational Compensation Survey, 1992-1996. These publications provide valuable employee salary, wage, and benefit data across regions in the United States. In addition to these series, we also expanded several of our Bureau of Labor Statistics publications, with data added to the Occupational Outlook Handbook for the years 1988-2011 and to the Geographic Profile of Employment and Unemployment for the years 1987-1993 and 1997-2017.
FRASER Updates
With the help of our dedicated development team, FRASER made many improvements and changes to the site this year. Our search tools became more robust, with the addition of an autocomplete feature to our search bar and more options to refine searches, including a search bar drop-down menu, advanced search, and a histogram to allow users to narrow results visually by date. Developers also implemented a number of improvements to decrease page load times and created a FRASER search widget to allow wider access to the FRASER archive.
Find it faster: FRASER added autocomplete functionality to its site search in 2019.
In September 2019, FRASER librarians hosted a webinar for the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) to share our rich collection of historical materials related to economics, banking, and the Federal Reserve System. Along with maintaining our always growing archives and Federal Reserve collections, the FRASER team also regularly updated the many congressional records and reports of federal agencies it collects. (Learn more about our processes to monitor and collect these materials with this Inside FRASER post.)
In 2019, the FRASER team grew with the addition of two new librarians, and all of us look forward to a busy year of expanding our digital collections and enhancing the experiences of our users. Do you have a great idea for a new collection or site enhancement, do you have some of the materials on our Needs List you’d like to offer, or are you a potential partner with materials you’d like to see on FRASER? (Maybe you even have a research question we can help with.) If so, email us! If you’re interested in even more FRASER updates, subscribe to our monthly newsletter and get daily updates on Twitter @FedFRASER.
© 2019, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis or the Federal Reserve System.
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